Indian protesters at a rally in Lucknow after the death of a rape victim, Dec. 29.

While India has promised swift justice in the case of the woman who died Saturday after a brutal gang rape, human-rights groups say the problem is much thornier than punishing the six men accused in this case.

The country won’t make progress in combating rape until there’s a wholesale shift in the way men, including those in power, treat woman, they say.

Indian women have made it to the tops of their professions in India. There’s been a female Indian president, women run multi-billion-dollar enterprises and Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, is the most powerful politician in the country.

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But on the peripheries of big cities and rural areas of the nation, women continue to fight for equal rights – and this is reflected in how authorities treat rape victims, human-rights groups say.

Human Rights Watch, in a report released Sunday in India, points to the so-called “two-finger test” as evidence of how India had failed to take rape seriously, often blaming women’s behavior for the offense.

In the test, which appears in Indian jurisprudence textbooks and is admissible in court, a doctor inserts two fingers into a women’s vagina to determine its laxity and whether the hymen is broken, signaling previous sexual activity.

The test perpetuates stereotypes of rape survivors as loose women and often is used by defense counsels to achieve acquittals, human-rights groups say.

Comments by politicians that most rape is actually consensual sex, has deepened this way of thinking.

There were 24,206 rape cases registered in India in 2011, according to the National Crimes Record Bureau. But the number of convictions of alleged rapists occurred in only a quarter of cases, the statistics show.

Many more cases are not reported due to pressure from families and the idea that the victim has experienced “shame,” activists estimate.

The case of the woman who died Saturday, a 23-year-old student whose name has not been released, has become a rallying point for people – many of them young students – who want to see change.

The woman was gang raped for over an hour on a moving chartered bus on Dec. 16. Authorities say they will soon formally charge the six suspects with murder, which carries the death penalty.

On Sunday morning, the woman’s body was flown back from Singapore, where she had been treated. The plane was met at Indira Gandhi International airport in Delhi by Ms. Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and soon after cremated, local media reported.

The city remained in security lockdown Sunday to make sure protesters could not get near central areas housing government offices. Protests last weekend in that zone led to violence between police and demonstrators, injuring 85 people.

The government’s response so far has been to promise a quick trial for the alleged rapists in this case. New Delhi also has appointed a panel headed by a former chief justice to look into ways to mete out swifter and harsher punishment to convicted rapists. The panel’s report is due in January.

Human-rights groups welcomed the move. But activists say there needs to be an overhaul in the way authorities respond to allegations of rape.

“For politicians, supporting the death penalty is an easy but ineffectual way out,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It is much harder, but more effective, to revamp the response of police, doctors, forensic specialists, prosecutors, and judges to sexual violence. Survivors deserve an effective, coordinated response to sexual assault.”

In its report, Human Rights Watch pointed to reports in the local media last week that a woman alleging gang rape in Punjab state had killed herself after police refused to register the case.

In other cases, police themselves have been complicit in rape. This has occurred in areas where the government is fighting insurgent groups, such as Chhattisgarh. (Human Rights Watch points to these examples, here and here.)

But it also has occurred in suburbs of the capital. Amnesty International, in its 2012 review of India’s human-rights situation, pointed to a case of rape allegedly involving police in Noida, outside Delhi.

Seven women from two villages near Noida allege they were raped in May 2011 by police officers as a reprisal for protesting over government land acquisition in the area. Two policemen and two farmers died in the protests.

A court in Noida over a year ago ordered charges to be filed against 30 police officers in the case. The officers involved deny wrongdoing. The trial has yet to begin.

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